The Search for a Black Cat in a Dark Room

Community Christian Church  
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
May 29, 2011   Easter 6  

Acts 17:22-31

22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, 'Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, "To an unknown god." What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28For "In him we live and move and have our being"; as even some of your own poets have said,
"For we too are his offspring." 
29Since we are God's offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. 30While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.'

30 NRSV Bibles arrived at our church this week from the American Bible Society, compliments of our own member of the American Bible Society board, Dr. David Trobisch.  David grew up in a missionary family of rather biblically focused Lutherans and has spent most of the past two decades teaching in a seminary.

And so, when he comes here to teach a Bible study and discovers that not a one of you brought a Bible and several of you are under suspicion of not owning one, or at least not one bearing the signs of translation since the invention of such things as the English dictionary.... It has nearly caused a cranial explosion in the mind of our resident Biblical scholar.

The American Bible Society came into existence nearly 200 years ago for the express purpose of printing and distributing Bibles to everyone, everywhere and in every imaginable language.  They are now grappling with the fact that it absolutely cannot be argued that there is a Bible shortage anywhere in the world.  There is, however, a growing shortage of people who want one and an even more alarming crisis of people who already have one being uninterested in reading it.

I can honestly say that I was one of those uncommon young people who, when ceremoniously presented with a Bible following my baptism on Easter morning, of my 12th year which was 1968, that I actually read it.

In 1968 there were no computers, no video games and there was only one black and white TV in the house and it only got 2 channels and the choice between those two channels was made by my father who, if you could made a dull choice between two channels, managed to do it every time.

But when the minister at 1st Christian Church in Glasgow, KY gave each of us our first whole Bible, he told us that it was God's word and that we should study it diligently.  Now, I suppose that is the kind of thing you say to children in church assuming that no one will do it but, for lack of a better option, I read it.  I memorized portions of it.  I wrote in the margins.

I made comments, put question marks by the parts that didn't make sense to me and drew underlines and stars around the passages which excited me.  I read from my Bible every day, at least a chapter but usually a good deal more.  I began to notice, however, that no one wanted to talk about it.  My parents asked me to go to my room to read it because it made them uncomfortable when I would read a passage out loud or ask questions about what I was reading.

Before long, I realized that my Sunday School teacher had never read it and that our pastor seemed to fumble with it at best.

The disconnect was maddening to me.  They told me that it was a book virtually written by the God who created the universe and would one day send us all either to heaven or hell and yet hardly anyone had anymore than a passing interest in it.

I grew up in a family that never missed church and when I say "never" I mean "never."  We went in bad weather.  We went when we were sick.  We went when we were on vacation.  I went in my prom clothes one Sunday as I was coming home from my Senior Prom at 9 a.m. after being out all night and my dad said, "Don't take off your tie son, if you are man enough to stay out all night, you are man enough to sit up straight in church for an hour."

We never missed, but the other part of that was the strange part.... Even though we never missed a service, we never discussed it at any other time.  No meal time prayers were said unless I said them.  Clearly, while the ritual of going to church could not be ignored, it was my family's intent to otherwise live lives as free of religious language and influence as possible.

I discovered that every other family I knew of was essentially the same.  Everyone was willing to parrot the claims that the Bible was the holy word of God and that God had several rather far reaching expectations of each of us lest He be forced to fry us up like a piece of bacon for all eternity but absolutely no one lived like they believed that it was true..... they were, in all honestly, a little bit afraid that it might be true and so they were willing to go through the motions of some kind of spiritual assent but just barely.

Most people, it seems, are basically atheists.... Skeptics at least, but they are hedging their bet with some religion in case it is all true.

It wasn't until I was in college studying philosophy that I had a name for this phenomenon based on the personal musings of the 17th century French philosopher and scientist, Blaise Pascal.  It is called, "Pascal's Wager," based on an entry in his notebook in which he frankly admitted that no one could prove that God exists but one should live their lives in a way to satisfy the expectations of the Christian faith in case it is true.  If it is true, then you gain heaven and avoid the punishment of hell, if it is not true, then you have led a good life and that is not a real loss..... you may miss some great concerts and parties but, all in all, it is a good wager to make.

Of course, to make that wager really work, you have to assume that God is pretty easy to trick.  It is difficult for me to conjure up a notion of an all powerful but intellectually limited God though such paradoxes do exist.

Similarly, I was not surprised that Arnold Schwarzenegger had an affair with his maid.  What surprised me was that he was able to keep the love child secret from Maria Shriver for ten years because doing that actually required acting skills which is not something I would have accused Arnold of having.
When Paul went to Athens, the heart of Greek culture and philosophy, we are told that he had a public conversation with some of the philosophers gathered on Mars Hill.  In a way he is gently making fun of their polytheism but he knows that they largely didn't take it all that seriously either.

Plato had written his works four hundred years before Paul stumbled into town and everyone had read Plato's rather mater of fact assessment of religion.... That the gods were useful in keeping the uneducated masses in line.... Religion was good for the state, it kept people honest, persuaded soldiers to fight in battle unafraid of death and generally supported the rulers.

The Athenians had public art which was, in many ways, just that, art, but the subject of art was generally religious in some way and so the art served the double purpose of also being places to pray or make oblations before a god of war, or agriculture, or fertility or commerce and, in this case, even to an unknown god in case we missed any.

The Athenians didn't know Pascal but they understood the wager.  As we all have, consciously or unconsciously, understood the wager.  But if you are here you have abandoned traditional religious views and all of its magic and superstition.  We're more like Joe Friday on an old black and white Dragnet show.... We want the facts, not the superstitious interpretations and wagers.

Luke does not even claim to have been in Athens with Paul so this is a second hand, Cliff Notes version of what Paul would have said in that civil trial.  Unlike when Paul spoke in synagogues and among Jews and Jewish converts, Paul does not quote scripture or mount a doctrinal argument.

He speaks to them in the images of poets and calls their attention to the natural world around them.  I think that is honest.  That is something we can respect.

When I was a young college student, we said that in the philosophy department we were seeking truth but that search was like looking for a black cat in a dark room.  When I went to seminary, I heard one student say that the difference between philosophy and theology is that in seminary we are looking for a black cat in a dark room that isn't there.

That was too cynical for me then and it is still too cynical for me now.  I have grown out of both belief and patience with a lot of the idolatry that disguises itself as Christian faith in our age but I have not grown out of faith.  To say that there is no God doesn't ring true with what I see when I look at the night sky... it doesn't ring true with what I observe when I take a walk at the nature center.... It doesn't square with what my heart tells me when I am confronted with suffering or injustice.

I believe in God but I believe that any time you try to nail God down to a set of dogmas in any religion, that you turn faith into an idol and all idols are slated for destruction.

My family and probably your family and every family you have ever known, felt something of the divine presence and they were told to take that feeling and shove it into the straight jacket of being Catholic or Pentecostal or Lutheran or Baptist when, in fact, God is none of those things and all of those things and too big to be contained by any of them.

And acknowledging that fact allows us to come back to the Bible and read it, not as a book written by God but as a book written by our ancestors in the faith who have also been looking for a black cat in a dark room.  Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong.  The Bible contains brilliant revelations and really embarrassing and sick stuff, side by side.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is not God's word, but God's word is in it, if we can find it.  Just as God is in the tiniest quark and atom as well as in nature and the cosmos, if only we can find her.
For the most part, the nature of God remains shrouded in mystery.  We can stand in awe but we cannot know.  We can worship but we cannot describe or control God.

And so we come here, not to participate in secret rituals which get us into God's favor while most of the world is in danger of punishment nor are we willing to play the childish game of trying to be barely religious enough to keep a demonic god off our backs.  We come to encourage one another to be more like the one who has taught us to show compassion and mercy, to forgive and to love, to be peaceful and generous.

There is a lot we will never know in our mortal lives but what we do know is that good can conquer evil and we can bring light into darkness and that love can heal hate.  We will not be dogmatic about what cannot be known but we are devoted to what is obviously true and so we are willing to sacrifice to give birth to the good and in so doing, we draw near to God.

Once You Were Not A People

Community Christian Church
Dr. Roger Ray, Pastor
May 22, 2011  Easter 5

1 Peter 2:2-10 2Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation-- 3if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and 5like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6For it stands in scripture:
'See, I am laying in Zion a stone,
   a cornerstone chosen and precious;
and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.'
7To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe,
'The stone that the builders rejected
   has become the very head of the corner',
8and
'A stone that makes them stumble,
   and a rock that makes them fall.'
They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.
9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people;
once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

In my very small hometown there was a country club.  My family didn't belong to it but I never thought much about that until one of my friends from church asked me to go to the pool with him.  In those days before air conditioning, going to the swimming pool was the best thing going on in town during the hot days of summer.

My brothers and I went to the large public pool.  We had friends from school and from church there every day and it was not uncommon for us to spend the entire day there, every day, during the worst part of the summer.  But one day I had agreed to meet a friend at the park to play tennis and then we were going to go swim, and at his invitation, I rode my bike with him to the country club.

It was a small town and so, once there, I recognized people that I knew from school, from church and some of the families from the Electric Coop where my father worked.  After about 30 minutes, a life guard came over to me, a young woman who was actually a Sunday School teacher at my church, and she told me that I would have to leave because my family did not belong to the Country Club.

Small towns being the way that they are, word got to my father that I had been at the Country Club and when he came home from work he scolded me and told me never to go there again because it had embarrassed him for me to be told to leave.

I thought that my embarrassment was enough but he was embarrassed because, even though we had cousins at the Country Club.  We had fellow church members and he had work associates there, still, we were a blue collar family and the Country Club was structured and priced in such a way as to make sure that it was a reserved only to the white collar or blue blood families in our little town.

These were still the days of segregation in the south so I can only imagine how it must have felt to have been black in Glasgow, KY.  Even after segregation, there were neighborhoods where black folks lived and other neighborhoods where white folk lived and if a black person was in a white neighborhood, it had better be to come and mop someone else's floors.

Over the past decades we have done a lot to break down some of the clear divisions of the various "in" and "out" clubs of life.  Jobs which were once male only can now be made open to women.  Schools are integrated in the classroom even if they are still self segregated in the lunch room.
Neighborhood covenants which once restricted ownership to white Christians are now a historical embarrassment.  And yet, after all of this progress, our nation is more divided than it ever was before, at least in my lifetime.

The political divide is a part of our daily bread now, being fed to us in the newspapers, on the radio as we drive to and from work and on TV news all night.  It strikes me that we are in a terrible rush to re-establish a dark ages European economy in which the population is starkly divided between lords and peasants.  

And it is not simply the people at the country club making certain that the Jews, blacks and blue collar folks can't get it..... it is often the poor who are fighting to make certain that they become more poor.... Insisting that we make it nearly impossible for labor unions to survive, working to un-do even modest progress in health care reform and championing legislators who consistently give billions in subsidies to big oil companies, military manufacturers and Wall Street bankers, all of whom are making record profits, while unemployment continues to rise, salaries fall and things such as home ownership and health care become unattainable to more and more people.

We need to be rebuilding the power grid so that we can build wind farms in Wyoming and solar collection farms in Arizona and move the power around the country.  We need to be creating good paying jobs for Americans but what we are doing is creating a few billionaires and a few hundred million peasants.

I am mystified by why the poor and the middle class so consistently vote and act for their own demise but I think that at least a part of the problem is having had any self worth, self respect, or dignity beaten out of them by religion.

I sometimes make jokes about the use of guilt and fear to get things done around here.  But as is often the case with humor, if there were not a substantially real side to it, it wouldn't be funny.  Almost everyone in the modern west has been reared with a certain amount of religiously produced anxiety.

Parents take their kids to church, at least in part, to socialize them and get them to become a part of a moral, productive and decent society.  However, the messages used to keep kids from being immoral, indecent or slovenly are often on the level of telling children that there are monsters under their beds who will kill and eat them the moment they fall asleep.

We tell them that their mortal lives are short and that at the end of this brief time of testing, they will either go to heaven for all eternity or they will be sent to a place of eternal painful punishment.  We don't want them to be sexually immoral but religion often makes them fear their own bodies, assuring them that to even think about sex comes with it an eternity in the flames of hell.  Unable to become something other than a human being, most become uncomfortably resigned to the fact that they are probably not going to ever see the pearly gates.

We want them to be honest and so we tell them crazy lies about how worthless they are, how evil, how corrupt and that their basic urges to eat, drink, sleep and have friendships all somehow lead them into paths of condemnation.  It is amazing how the message of love and justice gets so perverted into a religion of guilt and fear.

I have often thought that one of the most important gifts the Jewish faith gave to the world three thousand years ago was the concept of the worth and dignity of every person.  Whereas most ancient religions affirmed the royalty and insisted that the royal family was at least partially divine, while the peasants were made for meaner fair, the Jews insist in their scripture that we are all made in the image of God and the mere fact that we have breath is a sign of the spirit of God living in us.

The ruling class, whether it is in ancient Egypt, medieval Germany or modern day America, the ruling class uses religion to beat down the peasants into a subservient attitude in which they do not believe that they deserve to live well.... They don't really deserve good health care, a safe working environment, time off or prospects for a dignified retirement.  The few use religion to control the many but if that were the only kind of spirituality on the menu, you sure wouldn't find me wearing a big black dress in public.

At the heart of the Jewish faith, the Muslim faith, for that matter, at the heart of the Christian scriptures is a sense of the dignity of every person.  Peter says in our scripture lesson today, "once you were not a people,"..... you didn't have value.  You were taught that you were born to wash someone else's dishes, mop someone else's floors and do the world the favor of dying as soon as you couldn't do hard labor anymore...... "once you were not a people, but now you are God's own people."

Healthy spirituality should elevate the human spirit.  If our religion does not liberate us, inspire us, encourage us, then it might be time to go church shopping.
At least a part of why we Americans are willing to tolerate the growing disparity between the haves and the have nots is that a sick spirituality has taught us to accept being treated like dogs.

I think an honest reading of our Judeo-Christian faith tradition elevates our status.  I remember reading a quote from an English Pet Cemetery gravestone set over the final resting place of a bulldog.  It read, "Major: born a dog, died a gentleman."  Do you hear that?  Once you were not a people, now you are God's own family.

I love the old Spanish novel about Don Quixote de la Mancha.  We most often mention Don Quixote in reference to foolishness, insanity or meaningless crusades.  We say that someone is "tilting at windmills" to mean that they are all excited about something which is nothing.... Or we say that something is "Quixotic" to mean that it sounds noble but is, in fact, unattainable.

The character, Don Quixote, is, obviously, more that a little out of touch with reality but there are ways in which his unreality is better than the reality which has entrapped the minds of nearly everyone else in the novel.  Quixote imagines himself to be a noble knight, and, like all true knights, his courage must spring from a passionate adoration of a worthy princess.

Quixote fixes his attention on a singularly unattractive scullery made who is a part-time prostitute, Aldonza.  Don't let the fact that the part of Aldonza was played by Sophia Loren in the movie fool you.  In the novel, Aldonza is described as being very unattractive, even stupid.  But in the eyes of Quixote, she is not Aldonza, the unsuccessful prostitute.... She is Dulcinea del Toboso, the beautiful and elegant princess.

She rejects Quixote's adoration, telling him to see what everyone else sees in her, a fat, ugly sweaty prostitute whom men use and promptly forget.  But on his deathbed, Quixote is visited by a beautiful lady and he asks her for her name and she says, "I am Dulcenia."  Her transformation was complete, not because the world gave her the permission to rise above her former low estate but because Quixote had seen in her something which only required faith to reveal.

We have said in our vision statement that we want to give this church to Springfield as an example of a healthy spiritual community.  What we didn't say specifically but which is an underlying assumption is that our community is abundantly supplied with unhealthy spiritual communities in which people are taught to despise themselves for their sexuality and mistakes in life.  We are over supplied with churches that tie up burdens of guilt and fear on our shoulders.

A healthy spiritual community is a place of liberation, of forgiveness and healing.  A healthy spiritual community is a place where you can be safe to dream of yourself becoming more than you have ever been, more than what others call you, more than how you have been treated.

This should be the place where all of us who have been told that we should be the Aldonza's of life are given the awareness that we are called to be Dulcinea.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God's own people.... The most powerful, creative, intelligent and important people who have ever lived.  Don't let anyone ever tell you differently.

Investing in Community

Community Christian Church    
Roger Ray, pastor  
May 15, 2011    Easter 4

Acts 2:42-47
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 44 All who believed were together and had all things in common;
45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

By being here today you have clearly chosen not to attend the "Get Prepared" conference which is going on this weekend at the expo center downtown.  Playing on public paranoia, combined with the political organization of our local Tea Party members, the conference organizers promise to teach people how to grow and preserve their own food.  How to convert all of their assets into gold and silver so that they can survive the melt down of society which is sure to come, either by global warming, terrorist activity or the simple fact that we have elected a black, Muslim,  socialist to be our president.

If he were alive today, we could take Charles Darwin down to the Expo center and prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that human kind did not evolve from apes because, clearly, apes are much too smart to attend a conference of this sort.  But this shameless celebration of crippling paranoia is a reminder of when this kind of insanity was more broadly expressed in our society with our Civil Defense system.

My former church actually had those stickers in the windows from the 1950's declaring the church's boiler room to be a shelter for the neighborhood in the event of a nuclear disaster.

My generation grew up watching the civil defense films that taught us how to survive in a basement for two or three years while the radiation from a nuclear war dissipated.  I still remember the day in jr. high school when my friend, Pryor Johnson, just fainted and fell off the gym bench when they were showing us the film about how to deliver a baby while living underground.  

Other films dealt with how to ration food and water, how to seal and contain human waste in drums and how to set broken bones and stitch up gaping wounds.  The absurdity of the whole proposition of sending Americans underground to huddle together in basements that would no more protect you from nuclear fallout than the plastic sheets and duct tape suggested by the Bush administration would protect us from airborne anthrax never seemed to occur to the teachers who made us endure these ridiculous anxiety producing films.

Our church doesn't have a basement but, for the moment, let's pretend that it did and that our imaginary basement were supplied with sufficient water, dried foods, candles and potties so that we could all survive down there, far away from the purple rain or whatever it was which scared us into hiding.

Thankfully we are well supplied with doctors and nurses cause, "I don't know nothing bout birthin no babies, Ms. Scarlet."  I'll bless them but until that day, I'm not much help.  But, as much as I love every last one of you..... even when you are texting me at 11 p.m. or calling me at 6 a.m. to tell me something which could have perfectly well waited until office hours..... I love ya, but 24 hours together in a confined space..... 2 days, a week, a month.... Without scope or right guard???

What they never discussed in the civil defense films was how we are to keep from killing one another.  Just imagine if we barred the doors down at the expo center this morning and locked all of those paranoid survivalists in together over night.... How long would it be before all of those "concealed weapons" began to come out of their secret holsters?  I can't prove it but I would suppose that the shoot out at the OK Hammons Corral would take place before the donuts arrived the next morning.

In all seriousness, building community is phenomenally difficult even among the most sane and the most decent sort of folks.  It is a peculiar irony to me that solitary confinement is the most severe of punishment.  Criminals tremendously prefer the company of other criminals over being isolated but then we do even worse when we cannot have isolation at all.

We crave human contact so much that we have gone to great lengths to create a postal system, telegraph and telephone, e-mail and texting and now we finally have the two-way video conversations on our cell phones and lap tops which used to be only on Dick Tracy's wrist in the comics.  But with each step of technology that connects us to other human beings more easily, we become a little less connected in fact.

As our population grows, fewer people join civic clubs.  Sociologists have commented on the fact that more and more people go bowling but there are fewer and fewer bowling leagues.  And even though, here in the Midwest, we have this phenomenon of mega-churches, fewer and fewer people go to church and the mega-church allows you to remain perpetually lost in the crowd for years, sitting in pews surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people without ever meeting any of them.

I'm the pastor of a church that I helped to named "Community" because it is my goal to create community among us but I don't know my neighbor's name.  I have never met the two men who mow my yard.  I have no idea who delivers the mail or collects the garbage.  I have hundreds of friends on the Book of Faces, many of whom I have never met.

We like to look at people.  We like to be around people.  But when we are forced into close proximity with one another we have real difficulty in getting along.  We often find most noticeable about one another the things that irritate us rather than the things that attract us to one another.

In rural Nicaragua there is a saying for this, when you catch two people gossiping with one another, the question roughly translates, "Are you eating your neighbors at the fence?"

The one real exception to this is when there has been a life altering crisis, either a good one or a bad one.  The immediate reaction to the news of the 9-11 attacks a decade ago was seen as lines formed at gas stations and grocery store shelves where emptied...... the latent paranoid mentality that makes some people go to a survivalist conference came out in a huge portion of the society, even in an isolated place like Springfield which just isn't going to rank very high on a terrorist priority list.... But within hours partisan divisions began to evaporate.

Public servants, whom we rarely thought about, firemen, became national heroes.  People who normally couldn't care less if the east coast just boarded ships and went back to Europe were willing to immediately send the shirt off their backs to strangers in New York City.   Even I stopped publicly criticizing George W. Bush.... For several days.

And that is the problem.  A crisis can create community for a few moments.  When there is a common enemy, even people who naturally dislike one another can become allies.  It just doesn't last long.  The day Osama bin Laden was killed, the right wing could hardly find anything to talk about.  Newt Gingrich was so momentarily confused that he even reportedly made a pass at his current wife!..... I kid Newt!

Finding Osama after a decade long hunt for the world's most wanted man did not lead to a sustained sense of community.  The bad news for the 24 hour media is that you can only kill a terrorist once.  If he had been captured and put on trial it would have given them months of stuff to talk about but once the news was broken that Osama was dead, the best they had to talk about was whether or not President Obama would release gruesome photographs of the body.  I hope that the Tea Party doesn't keep up the drum beat to see the pictures as long as they kept up the demand to see the president's birth certificate.... There's only so much I can take before I am in danger of becoming cynical about their sincerity.

Our scripture lesson from Acts today describes a profound coalescing into community resulting from a different kind of crisis.  Luke gives us the only account of the events following the first Easter.  And Luke wasn't there so we are getting a potentially heavily polished apple but the basic story is believable to me.
The early church community had witnessed the brutal death of their leader whom they had hoped would become their king after he had led a successful revolt, running the Romans out of Israel.  Jesus was dead.  The Romans were still there.  Everything was the same, only worse, except for the fact that they had realized that in some very profound way, Jesus wasn't dead and the movement wasn't over.

I would not pretend to know exactly what that early community had experienced, not in such specificity as to try to put it into concrete terms, but they had experienced Jesus as Christ beyond the tomb.

After 9-11, I developed the bad habit of sleeping with CNN on all night.... To the point that when I am traveling I can hardly go to sleep in a silent room.  More importantly, I found that every sermon I had written prior to 9-11 seemed to look silly to my own eyes when I would open a file to look at how I had treated certain Biblical texts in the past.  The world had become instantaneously smaller and more dangerous and things that had once seemed important to me became venial.

 In the early weeks of the church, as Luke described it, the people's world had changed in such a way that the value of things changed.  What became important to them was their connection to one another.  Valuable possessions that they had once hoarded to insure their own security became unimportant and people willingly sold what they had so that they could share with their brothers and sisters with whom they were now knit together in an intense community experience.

I don't know how long it lasted but it lasted at least long enough to give them a name.  Church, in Greek, "ecclesia," means "called out group."
They came to be called a church because they did become a community that looked out for one another, shared with one another, loved one another.
I have often observed that Jesus preached about the coming Kingdom of God but rather than the Kingdom of God, he got the church and one is forced to wonder how he feels about that deal?

Heaven didn't come through a divine invasion of the world of space and time.  Evidently, heaven only comes when we find people to be of greater value than things.  When we can, with or without a crisis, create a community out of people who could just as easily eat one another at the fence but who choose instead to learn to accept, work with, share ideas with and eventually love one another.

There were several attempts at creating utopian societies in the early settlement of the British colonies.  The Spanish had come here a century before looking for gold and silver they could steal from Indians.  The French came looking for furs and tobacco.  But my people, the British, came trying to get away from other British people.  That's an over simplification but it gives me some satisfaction to sum it up that way.

When King Charles had had about enough of Puritan religious snobbery, Puritans began to immigrate to what became the Boston area of Massachusetts.  Most famous among the colonizers was Jonathan Winthrop, a wealthy Puritan who hoped that if only they could get away from the Catholics and the Anglicans, that some real Christian people could come here and establish a sort of heaven on earth.  He told them: We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our ......community.... as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace,
None of the utopian experiments were especially successful and some, evidently, resorted to eating their neighbors at the fence in an alarmingly literal manner.

Our church, our community, our ecclesial called out group came into existence in a sort of a crisis.  My personal crisis came as I realized that when I was no longer either a pastor or a Disciple that I couldn't find a church that I could stand to go to.  I gave it some tries and ended up reading my e-mail and sending text messages and praying for it all to end.  I honestly wish that I had found some place that didn't strike me as being totally irrelevant.

Many of you have reported similar experiences.  Some of you were excluded from your mother church because of your sexual orientation.  Others couldn't be comfortable in a church where your son or daughter, or your friend would have been rejected because of who they love.

Others had more complex ideological reasons for being among the church alumni association.  You got to a point where you just couldn't buy into the superstitious stuff anymore.... You just weren't going to be manipulated by guilt and fear anymore.... Or, as I remember very distinctly my friend Mel Miller telling me, he just got to where he couldn't go to a church where there was no mention of the fact that our nation was engaged in a deadly and questionable war and that we lived in a city surrounded by serious poverty and addiction.

We became refugees through doctrinal torture and religious boredom.  But creating community is not automatic for us.  Victims have a nasty habit of becoming victimizers.  We too can eat our neighbors at the fence.

If we are to become a community in a lasting sense then we have to decide that what brought us together is more important than any of the annoying things that might tear us apart.  We are not a community because everyone agrees with everything I say in a sermon or everything I publish in the NewsLeader.  Some of you wish you could hear some more traditional theology.  Some of you wish I would be less controversial.  And some of you are probably wishing that I would tell some more jokes about Newt Gingrich.... Shame on you!

We're coming up on our third anniversary.  The crisis of isolation that first caused us to meet together in funeral home chapel is becoming a distant memory.  You can forget that we have not formed a new church out here simply out of choice but more because we had no other choice.  Most of us would have gone to another church if there had been one to go to that did not insult our character, our intellect or our conscience.

One of the early symbols of the church was a line drawing of a boat.  Some historians speculate that the church used the boat image as a way to disguise the cross.... You could mark your home with a cross on the door, letting Christians know where they could come worship by simply drawing a boat at the bottom of the cross, making the cross look like the mast of a ship.

I'm not so sure that was it.  I think that it is just as possible that the early Christian communities saw themselves as being in a boat with one another.....like a life boat in which everyone's survival depended upon being able to cooperate and share with one another.... Like being trapped in a church basement together with nothing but communion bread and grape juice to live on for a couple of years.

Our mission statement says that we have formed this church because we want to work together for social justice and boy do we have our work cut out for us.

Do you know that the military budget in the United States has doubled since 9-11 and that's not even counting the costs of three Middle Eastern conflicts?  Military spending is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about.  Why are there no decent jobs?  Why do so many families live in danger of eviction, hunger and illness?  Because all of our resources are going to a military machine.  We have a mission to witness for peace, for economic justice, for an end to oppression, liberation of the unjustly incarcerated and an end of violence.

But we won't have a voice for long unless we love one another.  The Peace Network of the Ozarks sprang up in the midst of the crisis of the war against Iraq but it soon fell apart and the war goes on.  The interfaith aids network came together in Springfield in the presence of violence and oppression against gays and lesbians but the interfaith groups couldn't get along with one another and that coalition went away and the prejudice remains.

For us to make a difference, for our community to really matter, we have to fulfill that vision part of our mission statement that says that we want to be a healthy community.  This means that we decide to be tolerant, even when we feel irritated.  It means that we will decide to be agreeable, even when we don't always agree.  It means that even when a person seems to be just too full of themselves to be contained in a small sanctuary, that we choose not to burst that bubble.

We strive to be a prophetic voice of social justice for this community and to have the credibility to do that, the first gift we must give to Springfield is the example of a healthy spiritual community.

In spite of our political, doctrinal and personal disagreements.... What we agree on is that we love one another, respect one another and we are resolved to take care of one another both in crisis and in calm times.   By learning to show forgiveness and tolerance to the people we do know, we will become capable of showing forgiveness and tolerance to the people of other nations and religions whom we do not know.  An old commandment I give to you, that you love one another.

Feminism is the Radical Idea that Women Are Human

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor  
May 8, 2011

Proverbs 6:20-22 
20
My child, keep your father's commandment, and do not forsake your mother's teaching. 
21 Bind them upon your heart always;
   tie them around your neck. 
22 When you walk, they will lead you;
   when you lie down, they will watch over you;
and when you awake, they will talk with you.

A part of most weekday mornings for me is a few minutes of watching Morning Joe, a news commentary program co-hosted by former Republican congressman, Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of Jimmy Carter's former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.  They are two intelligent people who have different perspectives on the news and they often interview some of the most influential people in the world.

The people on the set are, of course, all multi-millionaires and they regularly shamelessly hawk their own books.  Mika produced her first auto-biography last year and, this past week, has already released another auto-biographical book.... It seems to me that the talking heads on TV news often have a terribly inflated view of their own importance but this second book may have at least a footnote of real value because it is, after all, about knowing your own worth.

Joe and Mika sit side by side every Monday through Friday morning with Mika doing most of the heavy lifting of the more complicated conversations about the news but she discovered that MSNBC was paying Joe Scarborough seventeen times as much as they were paying her.  Not twice as much.  Not ten times as much..... seventeen times as much.

I may not have the proper level of concern about Mika's plight since I generally believe that the people who sit in front of TV cameras are all over paid but her situation symbolizes the sorry state of affairs which still exists in the inequity between women and men in the workplace.

Huge strides have been made. A lot of barriers have been dropped and in any particular case you may be able to find a plausible reason why a certain female candidate did not get more votes than their male rival, or why a university hired four male deans in a row even though there were qualified women applying for each position but still, let me ask you to pull back the lens and look at the world.

Right now, in the 21st century, men own 99% of the privately owned property in the world.  Women perform 66%, two thirds, of the world's work.  Women produce 50% of the world's food but they are paid 10% of the world's income and own 1% of the property now tell me how that can be fair in 2011?

I want to share a little video clip with you from a recent Oprah program about an African woman named Tererai:

http://www.oprah.com/world/Tererai-Trent-Returns-to-Zimbabwe-to-Share-Her-Story-Video

Tererai's story is told more completely in the book which had caught Oprah's attention.  The title is "Half the Sky," saying that though women own only 1% of the property in the world, they still own half of the sky.

The book tells the story of women who have risen from both poverty and obscurity in Africa to become fully actualized human beings.

I don't want to take anything away from Tererai who really is a phenomenal human being but this video clip ends with Tererai saying, "I did it.  I did it."  And when she has been allowed to more fully tell her story, she gives a lot of credit to other people in her life.

Yes, she was largely self taught in her early life.  Her father not only wouldn't let her go to school and he married her off to a horrible man when she was only 11 years old.  She bore three children to that man while still herding cattle in her African village but taking correspondence classes.

On Oprah, you hear that her husband beat her because she was trying to learn and gain an education but when Heifer Project gave her a scholarship to come to the United States, he was more than willing to come with her.  They lived in a raggedy trailer in Stillwater, OK while Tererai went to Oklahoma State University.

A local church helped the family with food.  Her husband did not work but often sent what little money she had back to his family in Africa to present himself as being successful.  But, again, what you don't see on TV or in the book, is that her husband was HIV positive and very lazy.  Even in the US, he regularly beat Tererai and deeply resented her success.

She approached my friend, Dr. Jeanmarie Verchot, and asked her for a job washing dishes in her research lab.

Jeanmarie soon discovered that Tererai actually had a keen grasp of lab procedures and she took her under her wing and gave her an ever expanding role in the lab.  Tererai "did it" but it was Jeanmarie who helped her to believe that she could report her husband to the police, even though her African upbringing had taught her never to stand up to a man.

Eventually, because of his violence and Jeanmarie's persistence, her husband was deported and he returned to Africa where he did not long survive without Tererai's support.  Tererai was carrying a load of 21 hours, caring for 3 children and working in the university laboratory.  Her advisor did not want to consider all of the correspondence work she had done in Africa and tried to make her stay in school at OSU for an extra year but Jeanmarie went to the dean and did a degree audit, proving that she had more than enough credits to graduate.  Again, Tererai would never have stood up to a man in authority; she needed another woman in her life to help her to find her path to becoming the person she longed to be.

Jeanmarie helped to get her into a masters program, and then on to earn her PhD in agriculture and she is now the assistant director of Heifer Project international.  I can only tell you about Jeanmarie's role in Tererai's success because Jeanmarie is not here today.  She went back to Oklahoma yesterday to spend Mother's Day with her son.

But the fact that she has refused my requests to tell Tererai's story here in one of our classes or to allow me to tell you this story in her presence forms a large part of what I want to say on this Mother's Day.

I don't do Mother's Day sermons for a whole host of reasons not the least of which is that the traditional greeting card holiday fundamentally diminishes the value of women as whole human beings and exaggerates the singular fact that women bear children.  A great deal of what is extolled in Mother's Day greeting cards is the selflessness of women, and while compassion and generosity are values we certainly hold dear around here, we do not value self-subjugation.

One of the points Mika Brzezinski makes is that while men are self-promoting, women often tend to be self-deprecating.  Women are constantly saying, "I'm sorry," when men are pointing out what they have accomplished.  Men argue their value to their corporation or their university and women are constantly apologizing.  I don't get invited out to the "girls night" conversations but as they have been reported by many professional women, they often use their confidential friendship time to tell their friends where and how they are failing, what they are afraid of and how unhappy they are with their bodies, their home life or their jobs.

Women do 60% of the work and get 10% of the pay in the world because they spend way too much time waiting for men to play fair.  Look at Tererai's story:
She was encouraged to dream and work hard for success by her mother.  It was a female Heifer Project director who got her a scholarship to come to OSU and start a real education.  It was a female professor and employer who helped to liberate her from abuse and stood up for her in a male dominated university culture to get her first degree.

I'm not trying to say all men are bad, but you can't avoid that fact that Tererai's father held her back, her husband beat her and held her back, her male advisor tried to keep her from graduating..... if it were not for the women in her life who championed her, mentored her, empowered her, Tererai wouldn't be sitting on Oprah's couch saying, "I did it, I did it."

The director of the bar association here in Springfield, Crista Hogan, is a friend of mine who has had to deal with some really crazy hard challenges in life not the least of which has been the suicide of her first husband and the death of her second husband to cancer.  She now finds herself having to manage her own children and her second husband's children as well as a bunch of lawyers who act like babies and a good deal of rental property.  When I told her what I wanted to talk about today she wrote this to me:
"All women are mothers.... I always had my mother, and several assorted mothers of my chosing. And I serve that role for dozens of young people. And my kids have me, and they all have mother substitutes. So I don't think fertility is terribly relevant.

... but if someone could give me a message it would be something along the lines of "forgive yourself ..... You love you children, they love you. The mistakes are inevitable, so forget your shortcomings and move on."

I can tell you that I always thought Mothers' Day was bogus, and I had a personal opinion that it was designed to celebrate conventional mothers and not the ones that function like me.

I applaud the stay at home moms who cooked and cleaned and froze their buns off watching their kids play soccer or football, and helped with homework and clipped coupons' and sewed Halloween costumes.


But I also applaud the mothers who get up and go to work to show both their sons and their daughters that half of the sky belongs to women and that the sky is the limit for where their dreams can take them.

And I applaud women who stop apologizing and focusing on what they can't do and what they are afraid of and who start telling one another how powerful, how intelligent, how creative and capable they are.

And tell one another that you are beautiful.  It makes me crazy to know that more women die in this country from anorexia than from breast cancer because women are so insecure about their appearance that they are starving themselves to death.  It makes me crazy that we spend more on breast implants than we spend on Alzheimer's research.  Stop it.  You are beautiful.  You don't need to look younger, or thinner.... You don't need to surgically altar your face or your figure unless you want to do it for you and you alone.  It is your body and should stop worrying about what men think or what men like.

Ladies, before you go home today, you tell one of your daughters, or one of the women for whom you are a mother or a sister.... "you look beautiful."  And try to find a way to say to another woman, "You sure are smart.... You are so talented.... You are amazing."

I'm not encouraging gender competition.  I'm not saying that this is a battle between men and women but I am saying that if women ever want to own more than 1% of the property in the world, they shouldn't wait for a man to hold open the door to prosperity.

Commissioned to Forgive the World

Community Christian Church  
Roger Ray, pastor
May 1, 2011     Easter 2

Commissioned to Forgive the World from Community Christian Church on Vimeo.

John 20:19-23
19
When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit.
23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

My cousin, Temple Dickinson, wore a full thick beard when we were in Middle School but he was clean-shaven in High School.  The reason for this grooming change was that the student dress code in my little Kentucky High School, forbid facial hair.  But the Middle School had no such restriction because, prior to my cousin's early maturity, it had never been an issue.

Any dress code or operations manual is basically written to correct past mistakes.  If your office dress code forbids men from wearing fireman's overalls and coats and hats to work, then you can bet someone had tried it.  You can read your office manual as something of a hit parade of past colorful employees.

You can do something like that with the gospels.  They were not written during the life time of Jesus and so, they were written to accomplish certain goals of later generations..... it is not much of a stretch to realize that they were written, at least in part, to correct some past mistakes.

Mark was written first, then Matthew and Luke.  Then, a full generation later, John finished his gospel that, in many ways, responded to problems which were being experienced in the church near the end of the first century.

I've shortened our lectionary reading for today to just five verses out of this late chapter in John.

It records an encounter with the resurrected Jesus, something which is almost certainly, a creation of the gospel writer and not reflective of any actual encounter.

Now, that may not sound good to you but I can tell you that the church did and does this kind of thing even now.  You have at least heard of the fifteenth century spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a' Kempis.  Thomas writes this manual for monastics as if it were Jesus speaking in the first person.

You might think that you would not stand for such a forgery, but it was offered sincerely as what Thomas believed Jesus would say to the people of his day and it was read by hundreds of thousands of people with that kind of authority.

Several years ago, when I was living in Louisville, a young pastor went to serve a dying congregation with a large building in an impoverished Louisville neighborhood, and he wrote his weekly newsletter column over the name of Jesus.  Signing most of them, "with tears, Jesus."  Now, they did fire him after a few months and, I'll admit, I was somewhat relieved by that decision, but you have to admire his modern temerity.....well, maybe you do, I certainly didn't admire it..... but in the late first century, for John to write an ending to his gospel that was John putting words in Jesus' mouth to speak to the church of his time was entirely acceptable.

 Divorced from reading this as a historical encounter with the risen Jesus but more like a vision of Jesus coming back to give the young church marching orders.... What is it that John believes is so important for the church to hear?

In these five short verses, the post-Easter, resurrected Christ is telling the apostles that they are commissioned to forgive sins.

Do you remember that story in the fifth chapter of Luke where Jesus heals the paralyzed man? At first he says to the man, "Your sins are forgiven," and some of the religious folk standing around complain about that saying, "who can forgive sins but God?"  And so Jesus shows him that he has the authority to forgive sins by telling the man to pick up his bed and walk, which he, miraculously, does.

So Jesus has the authority to forgive sins and long after Jesus was dead, John wants the surviving church to know that this authority has passed to them.  In fact, the apostles have a fairly short job description in the gospels and high up on the list of what they are suppose to do is to forgive people.

Of course, the Catholic church, which likes to formalize things, takes these verses to justify a formal sacrament of the church.... The sacrament of confession or what is called in modern times, the sacrament of reconciliation.  If you read about the practice of the sacrament of reconciliation, it seems like a wonderful idea.  If you actually go to a Catholic church and look into the confessional booth, you will probably see about a half inch of dust collected on the seat.  Great idea.... Nobody does it.... Which is just one of the problems with organized religion.

 There is a parable which says that a Christian and the Devil were walking one day and the Christian discovered a great truth.  Showing the truth to the Devil, Satan said, "here, let me organize that for you."  Because, when it comes to spiritual truths, nothing is as effective in killing it as being institutionalized.

If, for example, the risen Christ had come to you and said, "I have given you the power to cure cancer, just touch any patient and they will be instantly healed," what would you do?  Would you make them fill out forms and wait six months?  Would they have to pay premiums for years before you touched them?

Would you tell them that you only touch people who were paying premiums before they got cancer because you refuse to touch people with pre-existing conditions?

Seriously, if you had been given the ability to cure terminally ill patients with the touch of your finger, wouldn't you be running through the cancer wards touching as many people as you could?  If you carried in your hand the cure for cancer, wouldn't you use it, share it, spread it around as far and fast as you could?

Well, of course, we don't have that power.... Or at least most of us don't.  But the cure which was given to us was the ability to forgive people and for a whole lot of folks, that's more valuable than being cured of cancer.  And a lot more people suffer from guilt than suffer from cancer.

Now, you might say, back to the cancer thing..... I'm not going to cure people who smoke.... They really deserve what they get.  And maybe you will say, "I'm not going to cure obese people.... They kept eating all of that fast food when they knew what would happen to them."

And you can keep going, eliminating the undeserving.  Of course, we've seen how that works.  Do you remember the welfare reform discussions of the 80's in which President Regan wanted to help only the "deserving poor"?  Except, when you really squeezed him on the point, everyone who was poor was really to blame for their own circumstances..... anyone ought to be about to get a camera and a couple of monkey's and make a few million dollars on bad movies shouldn't they?

And all of us remember the years when AIDS was first spreading across the country and discussions about assistance for those who are HIV positive often circled about the "innocent" victims.... Which meant people who got the virus through a blood transfusion or an accidental transfer of blood.... But not those nasty people who got it through having sex..... because, somehow, people who got sick because they did something which is about as universal to human experience as breathing are not actually innocent!  Hypocrisy is still America's favorite pastime.

What John believed was so important to tell the church, and, I think it is safe to say that he didn't simply have in mind a small community in Ephesus near the turn of the second century.... This is a message for them and, more importantly, for us.  It is not the apostles we need to worry about, it is the people who carry on the apostles' tradition.  YOU are commissioned to forgive sins.

It doesn't take a priest.  It doesn't take a special ceremony or carved walnut box.  You just need to get busy.

I like the way it is expressed in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

 Those of you who have never been to an AA meeting will have heard about the 12 steps and you may imagine that they say things like:  Don't drink.... Don't go to bars.... Don't go in a liquor store.... Don't hang out with drunks.... Drugs are bad, m-kay?..... or...Don't listen to Rush Limbaugh (sorry, I was thinking existentially.... Rush Limbaugh makes me want to drink).

Actually, the word "alcohol" only appears in the first of the 12 steps and the word "alcoholic" is only in the last step.  The rest of it is about spiritual growth and, the majority of the steps, seven of them, are about confession and forgiveness.

AA assumes that addiction is a spiritual problem.  You may not agree with that but AA has the best track record of success in helping alcoholics to regain sobriety of any program in the world so, disagree to your heart's content, I suppose.....


And, what is really neat about it is that there are no professionals involved... no fees, no one is in charge.... It's free and it works and it mostly focuses on forgiveness and we, church folk, really ought to be down with that.

4.     Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5.     Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6.     Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7.     Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8.     Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9.     Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would      injure them or others.
10.   Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

The one we Protestants get hung up on and the one the Catholics have made overly institutionalized is this concept in the fifth step. Most folks would still ultimately say that it is God who forgives sins but people in AA recognized that just telling God doesn't make it real enough for most of us. God is a bit of a silent partner in our lives and so you can confess things to God that you can still never really take responsibility for.

I have a friend who confessed to me once that he was having inappropriate feelings for a woman in his work place.  Their jobs were such that they spent a good deal of time in private conversation with one another and she was single and had told him that she had a strong physical attraction to him.

He confessed to me that he had similar feelings and that he was really frightened by that.  I asked him, "What are you going to do about it?"  And he replied, "I've already taken care of it.  I told you and now that I have told you, I know that I have to take charge of this and make certain that I am faithful to my wife."

Gossip is the scourge of the human condition and whenever you confide in someone you take a great risk, but to not be honest and tell another human being about your faults ultimately means that you are never going to take responsibility for them.

But when someone has the courage to confess something to you, you need to remember the authority that has been given to you.  You might not want to express it in the first person.... You know, you might not want to say:  I forgive you.... Remember, you are not Donald Trump.... You have to keep your ego in a certain amount of check.

I include an assurance of pardon in every worship service because I believe that it is just that important.... It's like being able to cure a social cancer.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux said, "You learn to love by loving."  Which is like the modern proverb that says, "you learn to sing by singing, you learn to ride a bicycle by riding a bicycle."  You learn to forgive by forgiving.  You don't learn about it by listening to sermons or formal assurances of pardon.

You learn by forgiving the neighbor whose dog barks at night and you move on to forgiving the person who doesn't do their share of the work at the office.  You build up muscles to be able to forgive your ex-spouse for..... everything... and you to forgive your parents for not being better parents and maybe you become able to forgive yourself for letting the dog bark outside at night, and for not doing your share of the work, and for not having been a better spouse and maybe even for not being a better parent.

We have the ability to bring a lot of healing to the world.... We can learn to forgive poor Mexicans for coming across the border to harvest our fruits and vegetables and them prepare them for us in local restaurants and change our sheets in our hotel rooms.  We can learn to forgive Muslims for being kind of stuck in the 17th century and we can learn to forgive the hoodlums who insist upon showing our local Muslims how sophisticated we are by painting graffiti on walls of their house of prayer and burning their holy scriptures on their front lawn.

I am convinced that we can never heal the world through judgment and revenge.... We've tried it, it doesn't work.  I'm just suggesting that we try forgiveness.... I've seen that work but mostly I've seen it go untried.

You are commissioned to go forth and forgive.... By me... by John... and, probably, by Jesus.  You are welcome to stay here until the end of the service, but once you hear Barry start playing the postlude, get out of here and start forgiving.

Trumping the 'How' of Living with a Larger 'Why'

Community Christian Church        
Roger Ray, pastor  
April 24, 2011       Easter

Matthew 28:1-10    
After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. 4For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. 5But the angel said to the women, 'Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come; see the place where he lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples, "He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him." This is my message for you.' 8So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9Suddenly Jesus met them and said, 'Greetings!' And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, 'Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.'

A great deal of my professional life has been lived out on the Opinion page of the Springfield NewsLeader.  As a columnist, I find it irresistible to read everyone else's column and the opinion pages in other newspapers.  A few years ago I realized that one of the most tedious aspects of opinion columnists is how often we bring up Hitler and the Nazis to compare such venial things as a failure to fill the potholes in the city streets with the Holocaust.

I have vowed never to bring up the Nazis unless I am talking about something on the scale of genocide.  Unfortunately, that still gives you a lot of opportunities to talk about the holocaust.

Genocide has been sadly common in history, even in Biblical history.  As much as Jews have a right to decry the 20th century holocaust against their people, we know from Deuteronomy and I Samuel that the Jews carried out genocide against the Canaanites and the Amalekites.

The Roman Empire always tried to conquer and then simply annex nations to make the land and the people a part of the empire, but when a nation would not assimilate, Rome would kill everyone they could find.  Julius Cesar did that in what is now modern day Switzerland and in France, killing millions and enslaving the survivors.

In the next century, when the Jews proved to be too unruly to govern, Emperor Titus had Jerusalem leveled and all the inhabitants killed.  In fact, even when the city was rebuilt a hundred years later, Jews were only allowed to enter the city on one day of the year to go and mourn at the only place where one stone had been left on another, the western retaining wall of the Temple mount.... Now euphemistically called the "wailing wall" for the two thousand years of mournful prayers said there.

Jesus was born and died during the Roman occupation but the gospels were not written until two generations had passed and the nation of Judah had been destroyed.  Paul wrote about the resurrection of Jesus in the decades after the first Easter but Paul did not speak of an empty tomb and he did not give any details of the events of Passion Week.

It is not until the eyewitnesses were either dead or quite elderly that Mark wrote the first account of the passion narrative.  Mark was not from Judah and was probably not a Jewish convert.  But clearly, Mark was heavily influenced by the suffering servant songs of Isaiah and by the substitutionary death described in Psalm 22.

Jesus Seminar scholar, John Shelby Spong, says that the passion narrative in the gospels does not attempt to describe what historically happened but they are an artful and loving account of who these things happened to.

It is often upsetting to church folks the first time they hear that the gospels are a combination of historical events, biblical imagery and metaphorical interpretation but let me invite you to think of that famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River.

It is a historical fact that Washington and his men crossed the Delaware on Christmas day of 1776.  But the German born artist, Emanuel Leutze, who produced the famous painting, not only wasn't there but he wasn't even born yet.  Seventy-five years after the Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware, Leutze combined his knowledge of history with his immigrant's enthusiasm for his adopted nation and its political father to produce the huge mural that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Leutze wasn't a liar.  He wasn't making up a myth.  He simply took what little he could know about an event that happened before he was born and produced an image that captured both the event and how the artist felt about the subject.  That is what we have in the gospels.

Mark took his passionate faith in Jesus and combined that with what he knew of the Hebrew scriptures which had been taken as messianic images and he combined that with a metaphorical use of the historical fact of the crucifixion of Jesus.  What I'm telling you today about the context of that writing, that it was written on the heels of a holocaust.

 In fact, it may well be that Mark began to write as the holocaust was taking place.... Possibly even writing because any surviving eyewitnesses were being systematically slaughtered.



Mark, then Matthew and Luke and John, painstakingly recount the betrayal, judgment and murder of Jesus.  Mark declares that even though he was certainly dead for several days that on Easter morning his tomb was found to be empty... which is simply a poetic way of saying that Jesus is not really dead.

Mark does not go so far as to say that Jesus could be seen physically but he introduces a young man at the tomb who tells the women who had come there that Sunday morning that they should go and tell his disciples to go back to the Galilee and that they will see him there.

The Galilee is where they had seen Jesus healing people.  That was where he spoke a word of good news to the poor.  The Galilee was where he had lived and traveled with his disciples but what I want you to realize is that when Mark first wrote these words there was still blood on the grass in Galilee that was not yet dry.

Jesus was a distant memory, but the holocaust was fresh.  The account of the resurrection of Jesus was not a historical claim; it was a defiant word of hope.  Matthew takes Mark's account and edits it.  He adds some additional quotes from the Hebrew bible and he feels the need to have Jesus physically visible on Easter but the fundamental message does not change. In fact, he says the same thing the young man in Mark says to the women at the tomb.... Tell the disciples to go to the Galilee and they will see me there.

When I first went to the Galilee, I went as a seminary student.  I was studying biblical archaeology.  I honestly wasn't interested in even the ancient Byzantine churches or the Crusader castles.  I wanted to visit sights of biblical importance.  But along the way my tour bus stopped at the Holocaust museum.



I was not a student of modern history. I knew a little about the Holocaust but my awareness exploded that day.  We then visited the Children's Holocaust memorial and it was several years after that before I was able to stand to read anymore about it.

Since that time I have twice had occasion to meet Elie Wiesel from whom we take the quote on our worship banner.  After the Holocaust, the mantra among the survivors was "Never again."  But what Elie Wiesel wanted to say to the world was that it never would have happened if persons of good will had not been willing to stand back and let it happen in the first place.  He says that the ethical message of the whole of the Bible is just this, "Thou shalt not stand idly by."

Wiesel's account of the Holocaust in his book, Night, was the memory of a teenaged survivor of the death camps.  It is so graphic and so horrible that for many years publishers refused to print it because they simply did not believe that the holocaust could have been so bad.  After a decade had passed and photographs and messages from the camps were distributed, the awful truth became undeniable.

But the writer whose experiences as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps who really brought meaning to the event for me, and by association, a deeper meaning to the New Testament's Easter accounts, was Viktor Frankl.

 Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist when he and his family were arrested and taken to the camp.  He was separated from his wife, who went to another camp, and his children, who went to another, all never to be seen again.  As he was taken into the camp, they took away his clothes, his hat, his shoes but he was trying to hold onto a manuscript of his life's work, his research which he was preparing to publish.

A soldier took the papers from him and destroyed them in while Frankl looked on.  The point, of course, was to break any spirit remaining in the captives.... To fill them with despair, to remove any resistance or will to escape.... To make them slaves or simply to make them compliant as they were being murdered by the hundreds of thousands.

Frankl was forced to do slave labor and to endure starvation, bitter cold, and he had to endure the dawning awareness that his wife and children would not survive the camps.  What he said about that was, that they can take everything away from you.... Your home, your possessions, your family, your life's work, they can take your freedom, they can take your health but what they cannot take is your ability to decide who you are and how you will react to the mistreatment.

Through the eyes of a psychiatrist, he made note of the differences between his peers in the camp who gave up hope and who became ill and died and those who appeared weak and had no chance of survival but they did manage to live through the torture to eventually be liberated.  He concluded that those who have a reason to live, those who believed that there were people waiting for them, who depended on them..... those who believed that they had something important to accomplish in life....

Those people survived.  He concluded that if you have a sufficient "why" to live, that you can live with any "how."

I believe that the basic historical facts of the Passion narrative are true.  I believe that Jesus was not a part of organized religion and that as a spiritual teacher who was outside of the salary and donation structure of religion that he was a threat to the temple priesthood.

And I believe that Jesus taught and lived a life totally free of ownership of property or obligation to employers and that as such he was a threat to the whole banking, marketplace system.

And I believe that Jesus taught and lived a life of total liberation, refusing enslavement and servitude and as such he was a threat to the government.  I do not find it hard to believe that the priests, the governor and his own family members and friends conspired together to kill him.

But written against the backdrop of one of history's worst genocides, what do we make of the resurrection story?  One of the great things about being in a progressive church is that there is no one to say what you are supposed to believe about that.

I will, however, tell you what I believe.  I believe that even though they could kill Jesus they could not kill his message.  They could strike the teacher and even destroy the city where the church was first born but the faith community continued to be reborn, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword, because the church had a why to live that was bigger than circumstances ..... even when their circumstances involved trying to survive genocide.

I believe that the church has survived as a sign of the resurrection of Jesus.  I believe that we survive because the world has a reason to expect something of us in the future.  We have a reason to live.  There is a need for us to be witnesses to that same message of liberation for which Jesus died.... That same message of social and economic justice, for which Jesus died, that same message of spiritual wholeness apart from any denomination or bishop or pope giving our franchise legitimacy.

You are the resurrection community.  Don't play dead.  Don't accept life as a victim.  You are not slaves and you need not stand idly by.  We are the resurrection of Jesus..... as long as we keep the message alive, he will never be found in a tomb.

The Passion Narrative as Archetypal Story

Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
April 17, 2011    Passion Sunday



Jerry Block and Sheldon Harnick, took an old Yiddish short story about a dairyman and his daughters and turned it into a musical play in the 1960's.   Producers turned Block and Harnick down for years saying that their play was too Jewish to be of interest to anyone who did not have eastern European Jewish background.  However, Fiddler on the Roof became the longest running Broadway play at that time and has since been translated into more languages than any other stage play.

The popularity of Fiddler is certainly not rooted in the wide spread awareness of the travails of eastern European Jews at the turn of the 20th century.  Its power derives from the way it explores such universal topics as love and marriage after 25 years and three kids.  It explores how a father feels about his grown daughters getting married.  It expresses what many people have felt about faith, nationalism, oppression and displacement.

It seems odd to think about Fiddler on the Roof being sung in Japanese and acted out in Tokyo but it is very popular there.  Really good stories help us to express our own feelings and to understand our own lives.  The classics of children's stories do not become classics accidently.  They become classics because so many children feel like Jack, living in poverty and threatened by giants.... Or like little girl walking through a forest inhabited by either figurative or literal wolves.

Regardless of how you interpret the religious dimensions of the story of the betrayal and murder of Jesus, the story has the power of an archetypal classic.

It contains elements of betrayal by a beloved friend, abandonment by fickle friends and the shallowness of public opinion.  It places the main character in a mortally vulnerable position in front of hypocritical religious leaders and unethical political figures.  It speaks to every mother who has lost a son unjustly.  To every friend who realized that they had failed to speak up or to act to come to the defense of another.

The passion narrative has also found an audience in every language, on every continent and in every century.  Imagine what it would be like to read it from the perspective of a poor southern black family the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered.  Imagine hearing it through the ears of the poor Salvadoran peasants after Arch Bishop Romero was assassinated.  Imagine being a Hindu and reading the passion in the weeks following the murder of Gandhi.

Everyone, at some point, can see themselves in the Jesus role, as having been unjustly judged, betrayed by a friend, and misunderstood by family, lovers and neighbors.  But to really understand the passion, you must also see yourself as Gov. Pilate, or Herod, or Peter or even Judas.  And you have to realize that if the story were being read this morning in Afghanistan or Iraq the evil empire would not be Rome, would it?

Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote Jesus Christ Superstar after growing up in traditional religious schools but always wondering about the role of Judas in the Biblical account.  Why did Judas do what he did?  What was his motivation and how might he have told the story differently?  In Weber's imagination, the sometimes two dimensional characters of religious accounts of the death of Jesus take on more complex and more believable third dimensions.

The famous and much more recent attempt to tell the story by Mel Gibson focuses almost exclusively on the aspect of torture and to do that seems to miss the point of the story entirely.  Jesus was not the first nor was he the last to die miserably in unjust circumstances.  We tell the story of Jesus because we are able to feel it at so many levels..... through the eyes of Judas who came to see Jesus as a disappointment, a narcissist who failed to do what he could for his own people.

Through the eyes of Peter who believed in Jesus but not enough to risk his own hide.  Through the eyes of Pilate, who somehow seemed to sense that Jesus had integrity which the governor did not but who could not seem to bring himself to do the right thing.  Through the eyes of Mary, who loved, adored, possibly desired Jesus but who still did not understand her own simultaneous love and fear.  And through the eyes of religious leaders who prefer the institution to the faith the institution was created to foster.

Today we invite you to enter the story again, singing "ho sanna" with the fickle crowds who danced in the Triumphal Entry but who yelled out, "crucify him" four days later.  We encourage you to sing with the apostles who were too drunk with prospects of their own importance to comprehend what was going on all around them.  And we invite you to feel with both Jesus and Judas what it is to betray a friend and to be betrayed.

Obviously, we only have the time to present about half of the music from this iconic opera in our service today.  We do not get to over hear the confused disciples asking what's the buzz.  We don't get to see the argument between Judas and Jesus about Mary and about Judas' own decision to betray his friend.  We won't have time for Pilate's pensive remembering of his dream or to witness the moral outrage of Jesus clearing the temple.

Still, I hope that it is enough to spark your memory and to allow you to remember the world's most important story again.  Unless there is a cold hard place where your heart is supposed to be, you should be able to feel the passion yourselves.

A part of me wants to ask you not to applaud today because the story is, itself, sacred and deserves our respect but I know that some of today's performances will be so shocking that you will need to applaud and, frankly, we'll need a few moments here and there to get instruments and equipment ready.

We are using a mixed media today.  We never do that but some of the music we judged to be crucial to the telling of the passion required orchestration and more voices than we could bring in.  Let us move back and forth between the classic film and the voices of people you know, re-telling a story which defines us.

Our spiritual desire for justice, true friendship, substantive love and a meaningful life is rooted in this story which has been translated into every language of the world and remains a fixture in every culture. You and I are in this story.  Our deepest pain is here and somewhere between the characters lays our greatest source of hope.